


A Murder of Crows

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-21
Updated: 2012-06-21
Packaged: 2017-11-08 05:57:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/439909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thine heart is like a shadow, grown great beneath the sun. It follows thee at all times, and flees upon pursuit. [daemon fusion fic.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Murder of Crows

**Author's Note:**

> So I did that three-sentence fic meme thing on Tumblr, and ammayrica prompted me with, "Snow White and the Huntsman, with daemons." I wrote three sentences, and then I looked at my life and looked at my choices and looked at my flagrant abuse of semicolons and then I said, "hm."
> 
> 17000 words later ...
> 
>  **Warnings** : There shouldn't be anything that wasn't in the movie. Nonexplicit instances of necrophiliac kissing?
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/112871.html).

-

 

 

He is a widower three days hence before the word of it reaches him, and on that day, he finds out amongst his fields three black cabbages, rotted at their hearts. 

The others bear no signs of disease, icy-colored in their beds and curling at their edges the way young plants do, and he stands there for a long while, puzzling. The reek of necrosis is strong in his nose.

He shields his eyes against the dwindling sun and spots the bear further afield, harnessed and head low and plow scraping shallowly at the earth in his wake. The soil is too salted in this kingdom to give much yield, for all their care.

He opens his mouth to hail him, when movement in his peripheral catches his attention: he turns his head to see a lone rider picking its way carefully along the high road, bearing the bruised black-and-gold colors of the queen.

The mountain mists dash themselves before the horse's hooves, giving it the appearance of one flying, and when it does not continue on its way towards the castle, but turns instead along the narrow track that winds its way to the farm, an illness steals across his heart. He drops the cabbages and swings the hoe up onto his shoulder, prongs out, taking an empty comfort in being armed. He calls to the bear, whose head comes up, plow stilling.

They climb down the rocky hill to meet the rider at the gate, man and bear both. 

The bear is not in armor, but he doesn't need to be: the rider is a haggard crone, black age marks pitted into her tired face, a knotted curl of tissue in the socket where her left eye used to be. She looks like she has been on the road for days, and smells like it, too. He puts a hand to the horse's muzzle, rubbing gently as the beast heaves for air, foam a gauzy sheen to its mouth. 

It shies away, unsettled, as all animals tend to do around him. (The bear doesn't count, of course, because the bear is no animal.)

"What news from the queen?" he asks, when the woman says nothing, just tugs listlessly at the reins of her spooked horse.

He can think of no reason why a rider from the castle would have business with him, not for anything but Sara, who had been summoned to appear before the queen a fortnight ago. When she told him she planned on going, like there was no question that she would, he'd regarded her for a long beat, before suggesting, sardonic, that she was only looking to get out of tilling the fields with them.

She'd laughed, and the night before she left, they baked three golden pies together, thick with slices of dried apples and dusted with sugar they could ill afford. 

As he laid out strips of dough across the tops of the pies in a careful crosshatch, the bear started into a song, a deep-voiced ballad that was more about the glorious spoils of battle than it was much of a farewell anthem, and they listened in somber silence until Lar started piping along in counterpart, hopping along the rims of the pie tins and making footprints in the dough: he thinks he could identify any of Sara's pies in a lineup, based on how her daemon pressed the edges; woodpeckers, although not known for being spectacular songbirds, have two front-facing toes and two rear-facing, making for distinctive footprints.

He can still hear it, the echo of Lar's tiny voice and Sara's high, chiming laugh, a ringing in his ear. 

These are sounds that will only ever exist in his memory, for the rider tells him that his Sara, his wife, is dead, passed in the honorable service of the queen, who in her generosity has paid for the burial and delivers her most heartfelt condolences.

Under her coat, tattered and faded with Ravenna's standard, he catches a glimpse of the rider's leafhopper daemon, a small green insect she keeps in the hollow of her throat.

He thinks, _That is fitting,_ and is distantly aware that he has sunk to his knees, as neatly as if she has dealt him a fatal blow. Leafhoppers are destructive pests, and a mating pair can ravage whole fields, destroy entire livelihoods, and inside, he feels strange, winded, battered and razed to the ground. There is a noise in his ears like wildfire.

Beside him, the bear rears onto his haunches and lets loose a bellow that panics the horse and sends every bird in the trees scattering into the skies. 

It is a horrible sound, cracked clean through with grief.

 

 

There are two thousand, three hundred, eighty-four stones in her cell. 

She has counted them all and she has named them: they have been her staunchest companions, and she tells them all that she remembers of her father, so as to make them stronger.

She has two dolls made of kindling, held together with knots and scraps of fabric she's long grown out of, one of whom she has named Mary and the other Joseph. She prays with them in hand, but has not yet fashioned them a child: she isn't sure how one goes about building themselves a Savior, and her knowledge of scripture has gone rusty, creaking out of her like the ill-tempered door of her cell.

There used to be many prisoners in the tower, back when the queen's wrath was terrible and new, her retribution swift. For the longest time, Snow's closest friend was the old priest in the cell next to hers, who used to flick her with holy water whenever she and Taillow tried to steal some of the unleavened bread before Mass when they were children, stuffing their mouths and claiming that it hadn't been transubstantiated yet and therefore didn't count. Ravenna kept him alive because he knew where the church treasury kept all of its coin. In only giving her very little of it at a time, he could keep himself alive for a few years yet.

In Snow's early days in the tower, he talked to her through the stones, keeping her mind busy with games of sums and wordplay, fed her scriptures about saints in much more dire straits than this. It kept her distracted, just barely, from the raw, unfettered _ache_ that used to be her daemon, used to be her father and mother and the life she used to live. She felt like she was made of nothing but sores, bleeding into the stones.

The priest's daemon was a grey-muzzled bandicoot, with very long ears and a funny-shaped nose, and at night sometimes, Snow would drift off to the sound of her claws scrabbling at the loose mortar between the stones, trying to find an escape.

The queen killed him eventually, and strung him up in a cage outside where she could see him every morning.

Snow didn't mind, because even dead, the priest could still teach her things: the softest, weakest parts of the human flesh, for example, laid bare in the steady erosion of decay, until only his bones remained, bleached down to white and salted by the ocean winds.

There are fewer prisoners these days, and they are almost always kept in the lower parts of the tower -- sometimes, special guests of the queen are thrown into the cell across the hall from her, eager young faces that gaze at Snow hungrily, only to shy away when they realize they can't see her daemon.

She understands their discomfort: how could she not, when she is the one that lives it, day after day?

She is alone, yes, alone in that horrible way nobody should ever be, alone in the way that corpses and phantoms are, but she is not, she doesn't think, _lonely._ She has Mary and Joseph and she has two thousand, three hundred, eighty-four stones. She has many friends, and occasionally, there are birds for her to talk to through her window, who tell her about their nesting trees and the chorus of colors that signal the coming dawn: things Snow hasn't seen in many, many years.

She misses Taillow. That, at least, never goes away.

It is a cold, autumnal day when she finds the nail, wrenches it loose from the walls outside her window. She tests the tip with her finger, a feeling in her heart like the fluttering of bird's wings, and hears somewhere in the sky, the high call of a magpie.

When Finn comes to the door, his black-backed jackal daemon slinking around his heels and the both of them grinning at her with white teeth through the bars, she is ready.

 

 

Finn used to talk to her, too, sitting himself cross-legged like a child next to her door, letting his daemon prowl restlessly behind him.

Sometimes during the day, and sometimes at night when she pretended to be asleep with her knees curled to her chest, watching him watch her through slitted eyelids, his gaunt face lit by the guttering light of a single candle.

It wasn't like with the priest. The only thing Finn talked to her about was his sister: how as a child, he'd been so afraid of her, the way she never bled when she fell and the way her daemon used to pin his to the ground with teeth and vicious claws like they were always fighting for their lives. How she moved from kingdom to kingdom, slitting the throats of kings and eating the innards of daemons and stealing the beauty of every woman, so there was nobody young left for men like Finn to marry. Just broken things, like Snow.

For some reason, this is what she thinks of when she sees the silhouette of some enormous beast through the naked willow trees: the touch of Finn's fingers to her stomach, the resignation in it, like he is already used to losing everything he considers beautiful to his sister, with time. It doesn't matter how fast she flies, Snow doesn't think she can outrun her own repulsion at the memory.

She hikes her skirts further up her thighs and breaks into a sprint, sacrificing stealth for speed. She keeps her head down and tries not to whip around at every noise.

"The Dark Forest is where the daemonless go to die," she hears William's voice, the way it once was, high as birdcall and chanting in her ear.

"Don't _say_ things like that," she'd chided him, widening her eyes at him in shock. Taillow sprung to her shoulder, shifting from toad to shrew and glaring reproachfully. "Mother says that the daemonless are just people who've suffered an unspeakable tragedy, and deserve our pity."

He'd shrugged. "You know it's true," he said, a bit mulish that she isn't quailing in fear like he wanted her to. "There were a lot of them, come back from the wars, all those men whose daemons had been killed."

"Soldiers," Snow said firmly. "Grieving."

"Phantoms," William shot back, lengthening his stride to pull up beside her. "Barely alive. Who slunk off into the Forest, one-by-one, turning into ghouls with dark cloaks who try to suck out the souls of every traveler they capture, all for the want of filling that void," and he danced his fingers up her back, quick as a spider's legs, just to hear her shriek.

She risks a glance over her shoulder as she rounds a bend, still running full tilt, the backs of her skirts dragging through the rotted leaves with a ghostly sound like rainfall. The glimpse rewards her with nothing but long, hanging tendrils and a haunted, misted space that has never seen sunlight --

A branch breaks, and then the beast from before is upon her.

It's a bear, up on its haunches so that it towers well over her, wide across as a wall, and Snow skids to a halt in front of it just as it drops to all fours and lets loose a roar that she feels, hard as a drumbeat to the chest. It knocks her to the ground.

The impact and terror steal her scream, catching it in her throat. 

The cold, leaden weight of fear drops into her stomach. The bear is thick-furred, white all over except for the black shape of its nose, and it is dressed in armor unlike any she's ever seen before; a faceplate and breastplate and gardbraces settled easily on its frame, natural as a second skin and held in place with chain mail that moves as fluidly as water, a rippling movement like a school of silverfish. She stares up at it with wide eyes, and the bear stares back, panting with teeth that are as long as her thumb.

She knows without being told that this isn't a monster birthed from the Dark Forest, so why --

A hand seizes hold of her ankle, yanking her close like a rabbit caught on the end of a trap, and then gigantic hands are hauling her to her feet. 

She does scream this time, flailing out with a balled-up fist, getting her wrist snatched midair and wrenched back for her trouble. The bear presses in close, huffing a breath of hot, stale air across her face.

Then she looks her captor in the eye for the first time, and freezes. 

Discord jangles along every nerve, a feeling in her skin like her skeleton is trying to flinch its way out: it's the same feeling one gets when a musical instrument hits the wrong note in the middle of a familiar song, or when silverware scrapes against a plate in just the wrong way. All the hair on her arms rise on end.

The man looks back at her in shock, his eyes as glassine and clear as tidepools, and she knows he can sense the same thing.

"Please," she gets out, not knowing what she is speaking to. "Please help me."

Before he can say anything, Finn rides up on horseback, his jackal dancing around its legs, and says, "Ah, quick work, Huntsman," and Snow White makes a wounded, animal noise and tries to twist her arm out of the man's grip. The bear grumbles, shifting its bulk from paw to paw, and high in the trees, a murder of crows cackle gleefully.

 

 

When she was just a little girl -- back before her mother got so ill her eyes turned as filmy as the insides of a hen's eggs and she couldn't get out of bed, and her daemon didn't stir for anything, not even when Taillow crawled up onto the pillows in puppy shape and licked at his cheeks -- her mother used to brush her hair by moonlight, and ask her what she wanted Taillow to settle as when she grew.

"Mother," Snow had protested, squirming. "That's a long way away."

Her mother laughed; that knowing, rueful laugh that adults always use around children, a little on the condescending side, but well-meant. 

"Not as long as you think, little one," she murmured.

Snow frowned, and, uncertain where exactly Taillow was, reached out with a quiet summons and felt the answering pinch at the soft point beneath her breastbone, the place she had always equated with _heart._

He came immediately, leaping down from high atop the bookcase and trotting over to them. He'd been a grey fox then, a shape he'd been favoring ever since the nursemaid had read them a fable from an old storybook with gold-gilt edges, about the fox who outsmarted the stork, only to be outsmarted in turn with a great show of manners. The moral of the story was about the double-edged blade of politeness, which Snow had been feeling acutely ever since she started making regular appearances in court.

"Do you think this would be okay?" she asked, letting Taillow spring into her lap, flicking at her face with his bottlebrush tail. "For a queen, I mean?"

He could be a stork like her mother's daemon, she thought, but she'd always liked it best when Taillow wore shapes with soft fur.

Her daemon licked her arm reassuringly, but it wasn't until the queen put the hairbrush down and came around to kneel in front of her in a rustle of fabric, bringing with her the pure, clean smell of seasalt, that she felt comforted. Her mother put her hands on her shoulders, pressing them like she was anchoring Snow to the earth and the flagstones that her feet could barely reach.

"You will be a wonderful queen," her mother had told her then, soft as a promise. "And all will adore you, as they already do. Regardless of whether Taillow decides to be a fox or a bear or a -- a slimy naked earthworm!"

"Hey!" Taillow squeaked indignantly, the sound of it lost among Snow's giggling.

That winter came swift, hard, killing the harvest where it lay in the fields and Snow White's mother where she lay in her bed. So great was her father's grief that nobody thought to fetch her for those last moments, an act that Snow thought she would never forgive them for.

The bells tolled ceaselessly, a slow and mournful clap that carried high along the cliffs.

In the days following the funeral, Snow took to hiding up among the ramparts, where she could pretend not to hear the keening of her father's great golden eagle daemon, or otherwise dismiss it as the howls of the trade winds. The guards pretended not to see her, wherever she climbed to, and didn't betray her location to William when he came to find her, Jubilee fluttering along beside him as a nervous, darting goldfinch. They stayed quiet, and Taillow curled into her side, becoming a hare as pure white as the snow that covered everything, turned every color to silence. 

He didn't change out of that shape for months.

Ravenna, the first time Snow laid eyes on her, was the brightest splash of color she'd seen in a long while, lean and golden, with eyes a shocking marine blue.

Her daemon, at the time, had been a butterfly the color of pumpkins and firelight, black-spotted and regal. A monarch butterfly, Ravenna told her, as the handmaidens brushed the snarls of captivity out of her hair.

"Oh, how fitting," Snow breathed, enchanted. "He's so beautiful. You're both so beautiful."

"That's kind, child," Ravenna replied, watching her. She didn't smile much, but that wasn't uncommon among the women in court who were of a certain age. They were afraid of attracting crow's feet, so rarely did they let their smiles reach their eyes. Snow wasn't bothered, too busy admiring the way Ravenna's daemon looked, pretty as a jewel among all that golden hair.

 _Stepmother,_ she thought, and curled her toes happily. With a powerful kick of his hind legs, Taillow leapt into her lap, shifting into the shape of an ermine and wrapping himself around her shoulders. 

She pressed her cheek against his downy white fur, relieved in a way she didn't know how to vocalize.

That's the last time she remembers holding him, because that night, Ravenna slew her father, King Magnus, and took the kingdom as her own.

Chaos. 

_That_ she does remember. Torchlit chaos and the jeweled hilt of the dagger sticking ceremoniously from her father's breast. The scream of dying horses, dying men, their daemons bursting into golden dust before her eyes. Ravenna staring her down, unblinking, a flat-eyed adder curled around her throat, tongue flickering and scales the same color brown as dried blood. William shouting at her from the back of his father's warhorse.

"Go!" she yelled at Taillow, who cast her a single terrified look and then sprinted on ahead of her. 

William reached out, careless, and grabbed hold of him, bringing him as close to his chest as if he were Jubilee.

Under any other circumstances, it would have been shocking, violating, the feeling of William's hands on her soul. But Snow had just seen her father murdered and a queen crowned with an army and a trickster's daemon, and the castle -- the faces she'd seen ever day of her life -- were being slaughtered around her. The shocked, raw sensation of it drowned under all the rest, echoed with only relief: she and Taillow were safe with William, they always were.

She pelted for the horse, which shied and shimmied, spooked by something much darker than the sounds of battle, to which it had long grown accustomed. Its iron-shod hooves threw sparks against the stones. 

Her stockings tore and the duke's daemon leapt up, bellowing full-chested at her pursuers; Jubilee clung to fistfuls of her fur, wearing the form of a tiny, wide-eyed monkey.

"Snow!" William called, voice cracking with fear. 

The duke yelled something; he sounded scared.

" _Snow,"_ Taillow howled and she reached for them, only to be snatched up with an arm barred across her middle. One of the queen's henchmen, with a hyena daemon that laughed in her face, high and tauntingly shrill. The duke's daemon slammed her to the ground in the next moment, roaring, and she elbowed the man in the nose with all her might. She dropped a very long distance.

Pain in her chest made her knees tremble as she scrambled to her feet, staggering down the last few steps and running across the courtyard.

It sharpened with a feeling like her breastbone was being split in two, like if she clawed at her chest she would find blood. She knew what it was: she and Taillow had tested the limits of this, as children do, to find how far apart they could be and survive.

"William!" she yelled. "William, don't leave me!"

"Snow!" She could barely see him through the haze in the corners of her vision, a pale white face turned around on horseback to face her. Taillow was in his arms; she felt it rather than saw it, William clinging to her daemon like it could bring her to him as well.

She couldn't run fast enough. Her cries changed. "William, let him go!" She could barely breathe through the pain, and she needed her daemon _back,_ even if it meant falling behind. " _Let him go!"_

But William, either too far away to hear her or too terrified to comprehend what was happening, didn't.

"Princess! Look out!" 

A man loomed up in front of her. She registered a glimpse of white-blonde hair and the grinning teeth of a jackal before something inside of her tore in two and she plunged into unconsciousness.

And then, somehow, ten years passed.

 

 

She doesn't know if the man is the Huntsman, or if the bear is the Huntsman, or if the two of them make the reputation of the Huntsman together. 

She follows them because she has no choice. She has lived all her life within the walls of the castle, in a cell in a tower with two thousand stones in the walls, and knows nothing about forests, much less this one, which was a nightmare tale told by men as war-worn and grizzled as Duke Hammond and her father, long before Ravenna came and the land withered. 

It's no sacrifice of pride to admit that she needs their help. It's merely common sense.

The great armored bear leads the way, shouldering away clinging branches that thunk solidly against his gardbrace, seemingly unperturbed by the black spores that exhale gustily from the ground with his every step, which have Snow and the Huntsman pulling their rags up around their faces to avoid breathing them in. He keeps a couple paces ahead of them, because, "you both smell like sewage," which Snow had mostly forgotten about.

"Yeah, and your mum too," the Huntsman growls in return, to which the bear just snorts.

The day lengthens, and after he tears her skirts, the Huntsman gives her a considering once-over that has her thinking of clawing at his eyes and flying, Dark Forest or no, but then he just says, "Well? Where's your daemon, then?" and she realizes that's what he's looking for.

Oh, how she wishes she knew. 

She used to think she could connect with him briefly when she was younger, curled under her window with her eyes closed, _reaching_ in a way that hurt inside her chest like she was stretching a new muscle. She thought she could hear things, sometimes, snatches of conversation that weren't coming from the tower, see glimpses through eyes that were not her own, of a red tapestry or a pair of hands whittling an arrowhead. 

But as she grew, she became less sure.

Maybe he's gone. Men can live without their daemons, she is proof of it, but no one has ever heard of a daemon surviving on its own after a violent separation. Not even among the witches.

She lifts her chin. "Where's yours?" she retorts, returning the look. There are any number of places under his jerkin or trousers where he could be hiding her if she were something small, like a scorpion or a poisonous frog, but she knows he isn't. She can hear it in him, the same echo that's inside her, like tossing a coin into a very deep well. He has no daemon.

 _Mirror,_ she thinks, deliberately, and is faintly startled to see his mouth form around the word in return, like he heard her. _Mirror._

They stare at each other.

He looks away first.

"Come on," he grunts, and shoves his way roughly through the brush to catch up to the bear, who looks over his shoulder with an expression that can only be described as long-suffering. It reminds Snow, very briefly, of her father.

 

 

He had been seventeen when his daemon settled, later than most boys in his village and far later than all of the girls, but nothing remarkable. 

Only a few days before the darkest night of the year, and his house was busy and bright with preparations for the solstice celebrations, the pervasive taste of cinnamon and sharp winter fruits following him even in his dreams. Relatives came from all the neighboring farms, bringing with them wreaths of dried pine and bitter tarts and the news that King Magnus was leading a campaign in the south and wanted able-bodied young men to join his army.

That night, his daemon slipped in underneath the blanket with him, nestled against his heart in the shape of a springhare, and said, "Is that what we're going to do?"

He nodded. He was the third child of seven, handy because of his size and strength, but not the firstborn son and not the only set of hands around the farm. He would be better used at the front lines, defending his kingdom.

Three days later, as they picked their way along the creek bed, where the ice frosted along the banks but the water itself ran bitterly cold and clear, she caught up to him and said, simply, just his name.

Her tone made him stop and look. She was a leopard, melanic to the point that she looked more like shadow than cat; he put his hand atop her head and traced a rosette pattern, faintly visible, with his fingertip. She came up to his hip, balancing her weight effortlessly on the icy stones, and turned liquid, lamplight eyes up to him.

As younger children, it used to be a game they played in the schoolhouse; everybody's daemons following each other's leads and becoming one thing or another, whatever was most popular at the time, crowding the narrow spaces between the desks and making the teacher sigh extravagantly. As leopards, each would be different; you could tell which were the daemons of the farm children, like him, because they were darker, built for blending in among the grown barley, and which were the daemons of the town children, who were brightly-patterned and sleek. 

It wasn't an uncommon shape, either, for the children in his village to wind up choosing -- the longer the wars dragged on, more and more did those of his generation settle into the shapes of predators.

"That it?" he wanted to know.

"This is it," she confirmed, and he dragged in a deep, cold breath of air that stung his lungs, feeling _certain._

Two years into the interminable war in the moors, she caught a stray arrow through the chest and lost her footing with a gasp, dashed into golden dust against the rushes before he could get his hands on her, before he could say her name or even say good-bye. 

The loss ... to this day, he has no words to describe what it was like.

It didn't kill him, however much he might wish it did.

It took them two days to find him, shivering violently in the muck and delirious from lack of water and lack of self, but that wasn't surprising. However much each army might hate each other, however territorial they may be, there's a respect to this that is never broken: each side collects their dead from the battlefield first, and then return for the daemonless, who are worth even less than the dead but are still their men.

The next time he remembers being aware of anything, he was in a tent, the walls of which billowed with every gust of wind, and a little black bird with a red crest was plucking at the corners of his cot, straightening out his blanket fussily, close enough to his body that he felt the tingle of it, like the electricity of an oncoming storm.

The nurse passed by with clean bandages, and the bird swooped away to alight upon her shoulder, and he heard himself say, "A woodpecker, eh?" His voice was as rusted as iron and entirely unlike his own. "So as to better drill through the thick skulls of others?"

She'd whipped around in surprise. Her name was Sara, and she'd quirked the corner of her mouth at him and replied, "It is an eternal chore, I admit, for soldiers have thicker skulls than most."

He hadn't laughed, not then, because he wasn't sure he remembered how, but he thought about it.

Sara and Lar weren't alone. With them lived a great armored bear, war-forged iron like him, who'd come from a realm so far north that no human tongue had ever given it a name. He spoke, not like a beast, but as a man or a daemon would, in a voice as slow and deep as still water: he owed Sara a debt, he said, for she had saved him when no one else would. She'd seen light in him where others just saw the animal. He would follow her anywhere.

"Do your people have daemons?" he'd asked the bear one cold winter morning, as they were out in the pale sunlight collecting firewood. Each word was carefully rationed and cost him more than he could afford.

The bear considered him. "We do not," he rumbled finally. "We carry our souls on the inside."

He thought about that, his skin crawling a little: what must it be like, to keep your soul bound inside you, caged by bones and smothered by wet muscle and blood? 

Hell, what an an unnatural notion.

As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he shook it off, because better that than the existence he lead, with no soul at all -- a man whose only remaining dignity lay in his eventual death.

Eventually, the war was won, and King Magnus, for all that he was a notoriously bloodthirsty king, was still a fair one, a good one, who loved his people. He visited the camp on his victory march home, bedded his tired army down nearby and came to speak to them. He looked each of them in the eye and thanked them for their service, though he knew full well that the sacrifice was far greater than anything the triumph of winning could hope to ease. The effort was still appreciated.

Not many of the men were present to acknowledge his visit; they were wraiths, a lot of them, hollow-eyed figures lying still on their cots and lost far inside themselves.

But there were also men like him, who'd once been farmhands or middle children or otherwise just terrifically stubborn, used to forcing themselves to perform task after task when they would rather be doing something, _anything_ else. Although not spectacular company, they were at least awake.

He watched the king greet them, his great golden eagle regal upon his shoulder, and realized that this might be his chance.

"Well, what do I have to lose?" he murmured to his daemon, though of course she wasn't there.

He approached the king, picking his way among the beds, and said, "Sire?"

Magnus looked up, and his weathered face smoothed into a friendly expression. His hair and beard were the same color as his daemon's plumage. 

"Ah," he said, at the helpful murmur his daemon dropped into his ear, turning to face him. "Of course. You are the Huntsman, are you not? I've heard of you -- they say you can track any enemy, whatever the terrain, and can identify many more just by the press of their boot or the scent they leave behind."

He nodded. "Aye. To be fair, sire, most of that power was my daemon's."

The king reached out as if he, too, could feel the lancing pain of that statement, gripping his arm in solidarity. "What can I do for you, Huntsman?"

"Your Majesty, I apologize if I overreach -- and you might have already divided all your spoils of war, I know not, but ... might you have a homestead to spare?" He looked away, and after a moment, Magnus followed his gaze: across the tent, Sara stole a moment with a broken shard of mirror in order to straighten out a crooked braid, Lar fluttering from shoulder to shoulder to offer commentary.

Magnus looked back at him, eyebrows raised, and his eagle daemon chirruped amusedly in her throat.

"She ..." the Huntsman mumbled shyly, voice very low, for he was only nineteen. "I'm not worth saving, and she saved me anyway. She might take me more seriously as a prospect, as a husband, if I had something to offer her. Aye?"

The king's eyes crinkled in the corners, warm.

"Consider it done, my friend," he said.

 

 

The following winter, as the bear cheerfully bellowed fight songs at the lonely moon and the Huntsman and his wife kept close to the hearth, her teaching him how to embellish embroidery just because she found the sight of him fumbling with a tiny needle delightful, the queen passed away and the king called again for all those who would bear arms in his name, for an invading army had arisen from seemingly nowhere and threatened the borders.

"Will you go?" Sara asked him. The hard winter had leeched some of the color from her face, but her eyes were lively, watchful.

"No," he answered, because he went where he was most needed, and at the moment, that was here, with Sara and Lar and the bear on the farm. "Will you?" he asked, because she was as much of a soldier as he was, she who fought the darkness that crept over a man's soul after the bloodshed and swordplay had ceased.

"If I'm needed," she acknowledged, not wanting to lie, and then, "now come over here, I need your help with this. Shirt off, please," she added innocently. "I could use with a glimpse of something pretty."

He laughed, and did as he was bade.

Eight years into the rule of Ravenna, Sara was summoned to the palace and subsequently killed, Lar splayed out on a platter so that Ravenna could dip her finger into his ribs, plucking out liver and lungs like candies as Sara watched and writhed and screamed, until Lar could not stand it another moment and passed into dust -- although the Huntsman would not learn of this truth for a couple years yet. 

Even staggering, daemonless, Sara wrestled a dagger from Finn and went for Ravenna's throat, only to be captured and hauled up so that the queen could suck all her age and long life and her love from her.

Before long, the Huntsman sold his farm to the alemaker's bastard son to pay off a debt, and took to wandering.

The bear came with him, which was perhaps the only thing that saved his sanity, for the two of them knew no one else in the whole of Christendom for whom they cared one wit.

On the rare occasion they passed through a town to replenish their skiens and sell their excess trophies for coin, the bear would remove his armor and travel at the Huntsman's side for appearance's sake, so that anyone who glanced at them sideways in askance might be fooled into seeing only a man and his daemon. 

People could always tell, of course: a daemon can identify another daemon upon meeting, and in the taverns, the bear drank as heavily as the Huntsman did, joining in on rowdy bar songs and smashing stools over the heads of those he took a dislike to. They woke up in the drunk tank more often than not, milkmaids skirting around them with their heads down, their daemons staying as far away as their reach would allow.

The Huntsman was daemonless, and the bear was the bear, and there was no place for them anywhere.

"A sight not fit for God-fearing eyes," said one barmaid in a village not far from the castle, spitting on him where he lay in the sawdust and spilt ale.

They roamed the moors and hunted elk in the highlands, and traversed the Dark Forest when necessary, for the Forest gained strength from people's fears, and therefore had nothing to use against them. They collected debts at taverns and paid them off with work; they garnered a name for themselves, they who could enter the Dark Forest and live to tell the tale.

They didn't speak much in their own company -- for all that they were rarely apart, it was Sara whom the bear and the Huntsman had loved so terribly, missed so much. They found no words beyond that void.

And then came the day the Huntsman came spluttering up out of a horse trough, and found the queen's jackal brother sneering down at him.

"The queen demands your presence," said Finn.

Somewhere nearby, the bear bellowed in outrage.

 

 

In the village of the salt-faced women, Snow teaches the younger children how to make dolls out of fire kindling and scraps of fabric.

She creates little faces and adventure out of the most meager materials, given only a little imagination to bring them to life.

The children, though they have never suffered a lack of playmates, are completely enthralled by this magic, and clumsily fashion themselves companions, giving them stunning dresses of cardamom red and swords made of rusted nails. Shrieking, they chase each other up and down the docks, their daemons flitting eagerly from shape to shape at their sides, before they remember themselves and drift back to thank Snow by showing her the trick to braiding the hair she can't reach in the back, solemn as if they're exchanging goods at a market.

Finally, after a few tries, Lily deems her attempt acceptable and leans back onto her haunches, asking, "So what happened to your daemon?"

All the women here look to be Moorish; dark and swarthy, dressed in a style she's never encountered. They cover all but their faces and cut tear tracks in their cheeks, packing them with salt to make them sting and ache and scar, to make them undesirable to Ravenna, but Lily has the pale eyes and dark skin of someone who is of mixed races. She is the least put off by Snow's captive-white complexion, and she asks her question without a hint of reservedness.

"The queen took him," Snow answers, which is a half-truth at best, but an acceptable one.

Lily considers this, seemingly unsurprised. 

"I," she decides. "Would trade every last bit of my beauty if it meant you could have him back."

Snow smiles at her, startled and helplessly touched. "Thank you," she says, and Lily blushes under her scars and ducks her head. Her daemon slides from her lap in otter shape, nervously licking his paws to wash down his whiskers. He looks up at Snow as if hoping to impress her with his handsome grooming, and she can't help but smile again.

Not far away, keeping them in their line of sight, another salt-faced woman applies a poultice to the Huntsman's wounds, enduring his good-natured grumbling about pansy men from the queen's court who can't even aim an axe properly at a target as big as him.

Beyond them, the bear goes fishing in the marshes. A curious audience, apparently interested in doing their laundry all at the same time, gathers at the banks to watch.

Zatima finishes, tying off the bandage with a deft twist of her fingers, and tilts her head at him. 

"You carry a great burden," she says.

As far as bizarre conversational starters go, he's heard worse. "She's not that heavy," he returns, amused, eyes tracking back to Snow, who is sitting cross-legged on the dock with Zatima's daughter while another little girl, no older than three with a teething puppy daemon, tugs inexpertly on her hair. "Although she is a mite unnatural."

Zatima snorts, so ungraciously that he shoots her a look, and then is forced to smile in rueful acknowledgement of the irony.

"Aye," he agrees, because that's a bit rich, coming from him. He'd ... almost forgotten, for the span of a heartbeat, that he and Snow are as unnatural as they come. It was strange -- that'd never happened before. "For the given value of unnatural. But I mean, she stood up and greeted a troll, eye-to-eye, said its name the way one might a daemon. And it _answered."_

The salt-faced woman stills.

Her daemon -- a basilisk with scales the color of lime peel -- shifts uneasily underneath her headscarf, drawing his tail around her neck like a collar.

She laces her fingers together and regards him, calm. "You don't know who she is, do you?" she says.

"Why?" he wants to know, frowning at her when she does nothing but smile, pleased, like she's never had this kind of secret before. "Who is she?"

"She," Zatima replies with great ceremony. "Is the heir to the throne. She is King Magnus's daughter."

The Huntsman whips his head around, for a second seeing nothing but the face of the king as it exists in his memory: the broad, friendly smile and the considering glare of his great golden eagle, the king who'd given him the means to propose marriage to his wife, who'd brought him the only happiness he had since the death of his daemon. Then his vision clears, and he sees Snow looking back across the water, as if the touch of his gaze summoned hers.

"The queen wants her dead," he manages.

Zatima's hand shoots out, seizing his wrist before he can wrench away from her. " _Don't_ let that happen," she says, gritted between her teeth, and her daemon hisses emphatically. "Get her to Duke Hammond's castle. Do you understand how _important_ she is?"

"I'm beginning to," he admits. "But she is --"

Daemonless. Wraith. Phantom. Unnatural.

Like him.

How can anyone rally to her if they can't even look her in the eye? If their first instinct is to treat her the same way they've treated the Huntsman wherever he went, shying away and muttering low?

"Trust her," says Zatima, and she lets go.

 

 

Among the queen's riders, there is a bowman, gaunt and quiet in a way that all those who ride in service of the queen are wont to be. 

He has a daemon named Jubilee, named for the celebrations that happened simultaneous with his birth -- a daughter for King Magnus, an heir -- and a quiver of arrows he never lets stray far from his body, for the quiver has a secret compartment that he himself built into it, many years ago, when he was still just a lad with gangly limbs and a hunger in him at every hour.

Before then, he kept this secret in a box and kept the box behind a hidden tapestry in his room, except for the rare occasions when he knew he would be left entirely alone. Then he pulled it out and opened it to the moonlight and the open air, though the secret inside never stirred or took notice of its surroundings. Eventually, because it's difficult to keep secrets someplace as crowded and busy as the castle, other children found out that he had a pretty little box that he coveted jealously, and they made a game out of trying to steal it.

William climbed the four poster to wait, and used every intruder for target practice.

They learned the hard way that William's secrets are secrets kept.

In time, he became more adept at archery than anyone else in Duke Hammond's army. In the banquet hall, while Jubilee nosed around encouragingly to collect news from the other daemons, he told anyone who would listen that the princess was alive and one day, they would ride in and rescue her, slay Ravenna in her name and crown her queen.

It was all anybody lived for, of course, though in their heart of hearts, nobody really _believed_ it.

Stories are all people have in times of sorrow, but most of the stories they told about young women who grew up around the queen were horrible ones. How could the princess survive that, when they barely could?

William had no way of telling them that he had _proof_ that Snow yet lived, and when the day came and he rode back from a successful raid to find his father waiting for him with his lioness beside him, wondering eyes turned up, he knew what the duke was going to say before the words left his mouth.

"You're right," said Hammond. "The princess is alive. She escaped her prison and fled into the Dark Forest."

William breathed out a shaky breath and Jubilee threw her head back and howled. He turned his horse around and she danced nimbly to his side. He couldn't begin to describe what was happening to his heart at this moment, because ten years ago, he committed an unspeakable evil without meaning to, and now he had a chance to correct it.

He would not abandon her a second time.

As soon as he was far enough away from the castle to insure that his father had sent no one to accompany him, he tethered his horse to a sapling so that it could drink its fill from the stream, for the poor beast had not yet been given a chance to rest, and knelt down in the brush. Jubilee crowded close to obscure his movements as he swung his quiver in front of him, screwing loose the false bottom.

"Taillow," he whispered urgently, as the compartment came free in his hands. He peered inside. "Taillow, can you hear me?"

Oblivious, the daemon remained curled tight, his eyes half-lidded and sightless. His ribs lifted faintly with every breath: if Snow died, he would fade into gold dust, but it still comforted William nonetheless, watching him breathe. He was a tiny, white creature, some naked cross between a worm and a rodent, pitiful and helpless and almost embarrassing to look at, like looking at a feeble old man who'd fallen or a girl whose skirts had flown up under a strong wind. He'd been this way for ten years.

It pained William to keep him locked away like a trinket, but Taillow never seemed aware enough to care.

"Taillow, we'll bring you back to her." he had promised, as Jubilee leaned in to nose at him with unflagging affection. "And we'll bring her home."

The queen's brother finds them a new hunter in the fen, a Moor with a deerskin jerkin and an angry stinging wasp daemon, and orders William and the other riders to burn the village to the ground, to bring him the princess. The salt-faced women scatter before the horses like rats before a flood, their homes and lives burning around them, and William flings himself from the saddle, spinning left, then right, seeing nothing but scarves and scars and terrified women.

"Jubilee!" he calls. Her long legs carry her far enough away that he feels the stretch of it, sharp beneath his breastbone. "Jubilee, do you see her?"

She ticks her ears forward, then back. 

" _There!"_ she barks, and William sees what she sees, and notches an arrow, letting it fly without thinking twice.

The man, who'd shared a flask with him the night before, topples from his horse with a yell and his sword still in hand, splashing face down in the river and ceasing moving. Snow White turns at the sound, like the touch of William's eyes to her back is a living thing. A stretch of burning timbers flares up between them. 

William stares back, voiceless, his heart in his throat. 

She is the most beautiful thing he has ever laid eyes on, soot-streaked and hair done up in messy braids: her eyes sharply aware, _alive,_ and he sees in her the girl he used to chase into the tree branches, who brought home wounded magpies to nurse back to health. It is her. It is the princess.

Fumbling with nerveless fingers, he scrabbles for his quiver of arrows, because this is the moment he's been waiting for since he fled the castle on the night the king was murdered.

This is the moment he reunites Taillow with Snow, gives her back her soul.

"Will!" Jubilee cries out in warning, and something hits William with the force of a sledgehammer, knocking him clean off his feet. He sails through the air and hits wooden planks hard enough to splinter them, and lay gasping half-in the water, feeling like a horse had just kicked him in the chest.

And then, looming above him --

"Mother of god," William breathes, terror running cold down his spine, and throws himself to the side just as an enormous armored bear pounds its front paws down onto the space William just was, roaring with such force that it shakes his skeleton inside his skin. Jubilee comes skittering across the planks, and flings herself in front of Will, snarling at the bear, " _don't_ you touch him!" She looks as tiny as a toy in comparison.

"Don't you touch _her!"_ the bear growls back, shocking both of them.

William touches the knobby bones of her back, panting, "Jubilee, Jubilee, come on," scrabbling to get his feet under him again, and the bear gathers itself to lunge for a second attack.

"Bear!" a voice bellows across the screaming and the crackling timbers.

Another man, whose daemon he can't see, has Snow by the arm, or she has him by his, he can't tell, tugging each other through the rushes where -- his heart pounds with relief at the sight -- the salt-faced women are readying a dozen boats for escape.

"Bear!" the man shouts again. " _Bear!"_

And the bear huffs out angrily through its nose. It swats half-heartedly at Jubilee, who dances out of the way, before it goes barreling through the shallow water, armor clanking.

William splashes out after them, but before he can get very far, a hand snatches him by the back of his tunic, halting him. His quiver almost swings out of his grip, but he catches it before it hits the water.

"No," says Finn, very mildly, and his jackal nudges up against Jubilee in a way that has her edging away, spooked. "Come, bowman, it's better that we gather our ranks."

"But --" he tries.

Finn's mouth curls at the corners. "We'll find them again. I'm almost glad the Huntsman turned coat. That bear makes them woefully easy to track."

 

 

The dwarves have the most fantastical daemons Snow has ever seen -- a canary the color of spring dandelions, a rhinoceros she's only seen in storybooks, a silent-footed lynx and a pudgy wombat and a yellow-eyed leopard that has the Huntsman flinching every time she drifts close. She wonders what it must be like, to have a soul that's bigger than you are.

"Aren't you miners?" she tries, stumbling a little on the steep rocks and jogging to catch up; having been locked in a tower most of her life, she is sorely out of practice with hiking, and her legs tremble near-constantly. 

The youngest one, Gus, looks up at her. "We're men, too, m'lady," he reminds her. "Just like you. Well, not just -- you know what I mean," his gestures at her, cheeks flaring red.

She smiles. "Doesn't it make it difficult, though?"

She remembers the problems the duke had sometimes, maneuvering around the castle with a lioness daemon, and there'd been a handmaiden of her mother's whose daemon was a black stallion. It made doorways and corridors a little uncomfortable sometimes, trying not to brush too close, and there were places in the castle neither of them could access. Those were the risks people with large daemons had to face, but there were other advantages: Hammond was formidable on the battlefield, and the handmaiden was the castle's fastest messenger.

Gus, who's too young to remember the mines, looks over his shoulder at his brother, the dwarf who'd confessed that he would have no problem killing a girl. Intentionally or not, both the Huntsman and the bear have tried to put themselves between him and Snow ever since.

Duir sighs. 

His daemon is a water moccasin, coiled loosely around his wrist. "Sometimes," he says, making a face at his brother. "But we can train ourselves, too, like the witches do, see? Separate ourselves certain distances."

"It's a mighty handy trick," agrees the dwarf with the leopard daemon, who lifts her whiskers in amusement. "Like being in two places at once."

"We see so much more than what's in front of us," agrees Muir placidly. 

His eyes are unfocused, glassy white with cataracts, but he needs no guiding hand to step over tree roots and loose stones. Above his head, his owl daemon keeps pace, swooping from outcropping to outcropping and catching them in her shadow.

She opens her mouth to ask another question, and then falls quiet, because by then, they'd walked into the full glory of Sanctuary, and she is too speechless with wonder for words. Gus steals another look at her, smiling, and the bear draws alongside the Huntsman, nudging him in a way that almost sends him sprawling. He shoves back, thunking the bear's armor solidly, because he sees it, too: the youngest dwarf watches the princess the same way he'd once watched Sara, like he wasn't sure what his eyes were meant to do until he saw her, like he wasn't sure what his life had been for until he laid it down in front of her.

 

 

In Sanctuary, even the trees and the jackrabbits and the keen-eyed foxes have souls -- tiny fairies that flutter like dustmotes in the air, watching their strange procession with open curiosity and speaking in voices that clatter out of them like wooden chimes, melodic and haunting; a murmur that continues even through the night. Snow rouses with the rising sun, summoned by something none of the rest of them can hear.

"The hell," grumbles the bear, drowsy, as she steps over him and wanders off into the trees.

Gus is already clambering after the princess, wombat waddling on ahead of him, so he nudges the Huntsman awake with one paw and hauls himself to his feet as well. 

Soon, they're all following, helpless not to, like there are strings running from them to her that've been pulled taut. They stop on the ridge, audience to Snow's slow approach at the feet of White Hart, who is the spirit of Sanctuary and the font of all seasons, the turnings of the year visible in the buds and dead leaves and frost on its antlers. The Hart bends its head to her, lowing softly in greeting, and she runs a hand along its muzzle. In the trees all around them, the birds sing their throats out, and the fairy daemons flit from branch to branch.

"It's like with the troll, remember?" the Huntsman says in an undertone to the bear, whose nostrils flare in recognition. "She met it the way one meets their own soul."

"Of course she did." Muir falls in beside him. "Can you not feel it?"

"What do you mean, Father?" says Duir from the back.

The old dwarf lifts his face to the sun, mouth stretching in a smile. "There are men like you, Huntsman, who lose their daemon and scab it over, who succeed in functioning and nothing more." His daemon hops up beside him on silent wings, her great horned head cocked to the side. "And then there are those like her, who turn a raw wound into a conduit. Her daemon is gone from her, so she finds him in all whom she meets. She greets them by their soul because they are like daemons to her, and her to them. She needs no Savior, for she is her own. She is Life and Soul itself, and she will be company to the earth, heal it after all these years."

The Huntsman says nothing, because he hears the truth of it. Where people and animals shy away from him, they answer to her; he and Snow White, forever each other's mirror.

The bear rumbles, shifting his weight onto his back paws. The dwarves gather closer, awestruck. 

Below in the glade, Snow laughs and the Hart's ears flick forward, and the leaves on the trees stretch wider as if in answer.

"Can you not feel it?" Muir asks again. "Are your ailments not gone? Does she not make you forget, Huntsman, if only for a moment, that horrible ache inside you?"

 _"Archer!"_ the bear roars, and in the next second, the Hart shrieks and rears, hooves flailing. An arrow protrudes from its chest.

The sky darkens and Sanctuary screams.

The Huntsman sprints forward, axe in hand, and for the briefest of seconds, catches a glimpse of the laughing face of a jackal through the trees.

 

 

Finn cannot bleed, for his sister's magic protects him, binds him closer to her than even her own daemon.

Emboldened by his own immortality, he taunts the Huntsman, spreading his arms invitingly with sword in one hand an a dagger in the other, and sneers when the Huntsman does naught but study him for a long moment. Then, faster than the eye can follow, he spins around and with one fell swoop of his axe, cleaves the jackal daemon in two.

Far away in a dungeon tower, Ravenna collapses to the flagstones with a cry that sends every crow and skua and tern exploding into the sky, a beating of wings like a thunderclap.

It is a pain no man should ever have to endure, and no one else would have even dared.

The Huntsman watches Finn writhe on the ground, skin shriveling off his bones and eyes sinking into his head and his fingers scrabbling at the dirt like he's hoping to find his daemon or his sister, some final comfort, and feels nothing. _That,_ he thinks, turning away from the sight and scanning the trees for any sign of the princess, wondering if maybe he should be feeling some kind of dark satisfaction. _Is for every husband who's ever lost a bride to you and your queen._

He hears, off in the distance, Gus yell and the bear bellow, and his heart leaps into his throat. He takes off at a run.

When he finds them, it's to see Gus on his back, staring glassy-eyed at the heavens. Snow is bent over him, tears standing in her eyes, breathing harshly like something vital has been torn from her.

A slim young man he doesn't know hovers nearby, a quiver of arrows on his back, the sight of which makes the Huntsman step forward with an angry noise, envisioning the bulging pain in the Hart's eyes as the arrow lanced through its heart, only for Beith's leopard daemon to step in front of him, shaking her head and gesturing at the keeled-over corpse of a Moor. It wasn't him, then.

A greyhound dances around them both, staring unblinkingly at Snow in the manner of one who hasn't seen sunlight in years. She is sleek, the color of rainfall and ash.

The golden dust from Gus's daemon settles slowly across the grass.

 

 

They make camp in the highlands, where the snow falls steadily all night, obliterating the world with white. William shivers by the fire, and feels very confused.

Jubilee stands, stretching out the kinks in her back, and then lopes around to his other side and curls up, resting her head on his thigh. He strokes her ears back absently, eyes tracking over to where Snow and the Huntsman (did the man not have a name?) knelt together downstream; he was showing her how to break the top layer of ice with the butt of an axe, and something fond flutters inside William's chest at the face she makes when she takes a drink, the water cold enough to hurt.

He reaches out to the side, but his quiver is still there, hooked on the root of a fallen log so that it doesn't touch the snow.

He checked earlier: Taillow is still in the hidden compartment, curled tight and for all appearances still in his trance. It'd been a risk to do even that much, and he thinks he might have been spotted by the old dwarf's big owl daemon, but Snow hadn't even looked around. He had to make sure.

He ... he isn't sure what he expected, but he thought that maybe ... maybe Snow would have just _known._ Or Taillow would have stirred, or something.

Something more than what's happening. It's as if Snow and Taillow are strangers who've never met.

He'd meant to present them to each other the second he got a chance, but then Gus took that arrow and Snow's whole body flinched in reaction. There'd been something there, something in the way her steady breathing calmed him down as he died, like they were connected, something in the way Snow wept that made him pause. And after had been the funeral pyre, and it never seemed like the right moment.

William throws off the coat he'd been using as blanket, standing. 

His joints feel stiff and his fingers are numb, but he crunches his way through the snowfall, Jubilee a silent shadow padding along behind him.

Snow stands as soon as he's near, brushing ice off her hands and offering him a smile. Her mouth is shockingly red.

"I'm sorry I left you," he blurts out, and Jubilee coughs quietly, as if embarrassed by him.

Snow blinks up at him. "You didn't," she replies, a little blankly, like she has no idea what he's referring to. "You never left me. You were never far from my mind, not all these years."

Her words kindle something strange and warm inside his chest. A little hasty, the Huntsman makes his retreat, although he's a bit too big to be very subtle about it, lumbering off to give the dwarf currently on watch grief about something. William watches him walk away, feeling that familiar chill at the sight of him -- daemonless. Unnatural. The kind of man who would crawl into the Dark Forest to die.

 _Soldier,_ he hears Snow's childlike voice, reprimanding him.

By all rights, she should spook him as well, but she doesn't. He knows exactly where her daemon is.

"William," says Snow, and her gaze drifts down, fond. "Jubilee."

Jubilee's ears prick forward.

"A greyhound?" Snow looks up at him through her lashes, and there's the smile he remembers, turning her mouth into a wry shape. He remembers conversations with her as they watched the evening storms roll in from the sea -- all the things their daemons could choose to be; eagles or wrens, vipers or roaches or foxes or hogs. "That's what she picked? Dogs are the daemons of servants. I never took you for the domesticated type."

"Oh, I've been domesticated all my life, princess," he returns, and color flushes across her cheeks. His voice drops against his will. "And a servant to only one."

She lifts her chin, and places a hand over his heart, pushing at him gently.

"Go, William," she tells him, and he cannot, for the life of him, look away from her in that moment. "Get some sleep."

Within an hour, she will be dead in his arms.

 

 

It's the single bite of a poisoned apple that does it, given in friendship from a face she trusts.

It grows furry and fibrous in her throat, blocking all of her air. She chokes and gags and claws at her neck, caught up in the throes and twisting on her back in the snow. Desperately, she reaches into that soft spot beneath her breastbone, and feels a sharp and urgent glimmer flare up in response: feels the Huntsman come awake in a panic, and William, and the bear and the dwarves, the slumbering squirrels in the trees and the snakes burrowed beneath the earth. 

Even Ravenna, suspended above her with knife in hand, can feel it. She shudders, uneasy, and her daemon shifts out of that eerie replica of Jubilee he'd been wearing, becoming something more similar to Finn's jackal.

Then the bear explodes into the clearing, ferocious in his fury, and the queen spins to her feet. 

At the sight of her, the bear reacts as if struck by lightning, launching himself forward to meet her blow. Whether it is Sara or Snow he sees dying there at her feet, it doesn't matter, because his hatred and his love are his armor both.

William and the Huntsman are right behind him, their faces shock-white with the pain they have yet to truly _feel,_ and the rhinoceros daemon barrels in close on their heels, and Ravenna flees, turning herself and her daemon into a pair of crows, disappearing into a flock of them and scattering into the sky.

The bear bellows threats after them, and the canary and the owl daemon give chase to the best of their ability, but William drops to his knees at Snow's side, fumbling with his quiver.

"No," he mumbles, low and hurt, and Jubilee tucks her tail between her legs, whimpering. "No, no, _please."_

It's so strange and makes so little sense that even the bear stills, watching: William hauls Snow's unresponsive body into his lap and unscrews the false bottom, tipping it over her chest.

Slowly, so very slowly, something obscene and milky-white spills bonelessly from the container, catching in the loose cradle at the collar of her dress, lying lengthwise across her skin. He has no fur and tiny paws, and his veins show clearly underneath his skin.

Snow's fingers twitch. Her eyelids flutter.

"You --" starts the Huntsman, who is the first to realize what the naked thing is. "All this _time,_ you've had --" He starts forward, raising his axe with an incandescently furious look on his face, only to be halted by a sharp exclamation from Beith. The dwarves and their daemons cluster together in the background.

Taillow's eyes open fully. They blink. They focus.

He lifts his head. Snow makes a single, low noise, fingers extending and curling around his body.

And Taillow exhales, falling away into golden dust.

 _"No --"_ William chokes. He grabs for her face, tilting it up and sealing his mouth over her own, dragging in a deep breath to try to suck the obstruction from her throat. 

Somewhere behind him, the Huntsman had dropped, as neatly felled as if he'd been hamstrung, and the bear comes over to nose at him worriedly. William tries once more to revive the princess, to no avail, and once more after that, until one of the seven dwarves who'd never had much to say comes over, placing a hand on his shoulder and murmuring, "Lad. Lad, she's gone."

William rocks back. He weeps and weeps and weeps, tears running hot down his face.

The snow falls quietly all around.

 

 

There is talk of building her a glass coffin and holding a funeral fit for a queen, but there are no glass-blowers in the vicinity of Duke Hammond's castle with the kilns large enough for such a task, and not enough money to pay for it besides.

So they dress her in bride's colors and lay her out on furs they can ill-afford to spare.

It's late enough that the procession of well-wishers has ceased; hungry-eyed people grown lean from rationing and war, shuffling by to get their first and only glimpse of the princess they'd longed to see for so many years, who is as beautiful and resplendent, even in death, as they had always hoped. The only ones who remain behind are the Huntsman, up in the choir loft with the holy wine he'd nicked from the chapel tabernacle, and Jubilee, resting at the foot of the dais with her head on her paws.

The Huntsman can hear, faintly, the sounds of William arguing with his father in the war tent just outside, but the greyhound daemon doesn't so much as glance in that direction. It's as if she and William can't stand the sight of each other, for all that the pain of distance must rend at them both.

He'd forgotten what that's like, to be so at odds with yourself that your daemon won't even submit to being in the same room.

He remembers waking, earlier, in a way that wasn't so much _waking_ as it was an abrupt return to awareness, sitting bolt upright and clawing at his chest, because he was bleeding, he had to be bleeding, there was a fatal wound carved right down the middle of him, there --

There hadn't been anything but skin and the remnants of Zatima's poultice, and Coll looking down at him in a bemused way, his mouth a grim line.

"Was wonderin' when you were gonna join us again, Huntsman," the dwarf had said. "Of all the bleedin' times you could have picked to take a nap."

"Wasn't a --" he growled in return, before he stopped.

It'd been strange, so strange, an echo of a feeling like he should be elsewhere and many years ago, like he should have opened his eyes and found himself in that war camp, watching Lar drill holes in the frame for a new cot and Sara nearby with a pitcher of clear water, like he shouldn't have found himself here by this mountain ravine. He felt like someone had ripped his spine straight from his flesh like a fish, one vertebrae at a time. It was horribly familiar.

The last time it'd been this bad, he'd lain in a battlefield for two days until they lifted him onto a stretcher and brought him to Sara.

Men aren't made to survive this.

"Yeah," Coll responded, even though he hadn't finished his sentence. "That's what we figured."

"The princess?" he'd asked, even though he knew. He _knew._

The hunted, wounded expression on Coll's face told him the rest. "Come on," was all he said, standing back. "That bear of yours has offered to carry her the rest of the way, like we promised, so they're fixing up a harness now."

"Right," the Huntsman had said, distractedly, for he had caught sight of William standing off by himself, turning Gus's sword over in his hands and staring at it like he'd never seen the likes of it: rough-hewn iron and the only weapon Snow allowed herself to carry. Snow White, who never imagined she could bring herself to kill, not when she felt every death as keenly as if it were her own.

Faster than he knew he could move, he was on his feet and had closed the distance between them. He caught William up against his chest, pinning him in place with the strength of his arms and the blade of his axe against his throat. 

He nicked him. Blood slid down the flat of the blade, and three drops blossomed darkly crimson in the snow at their feet.

"I believe _you,"_ he'd snarled, and William's heart thrummed against his hand, terrified. "Owe us a _story."_

So, as they closed the last bit of distance between themselves and the duke's castle, William told them the secret he'd carried since childhood: how, as a terrified boy on the back of a fleeing warhorse, he'd accidentally torn Snow's daemon from her, and fought tooth and nail to keep him well and hidden all the years they were apart. It was the kind of thing people could survive, the Huntsman knew, because there were the witches (who were uncommon this far south, but the bear had a dozen stories -- now that he'd caught a glimpse of Ravenna herself, he was fairly certain she'd been born to a witch's coven not far from the bears' own land) and the dwarves, but those were practiced separations, and rare, nothing like as violent as what happened to the princess and Taillow.

He's still turning bits of the tale over in his head when the wineskin goes empty.

Feeling blasphemous, he throws it down into the sanctuary. Jubilee looks up at the clatter it makes as it rolls to a stop in front of the altar, but she doesn't move.

Everything inside of him hurts, stings at him with each breath as if pieces of him have been carved away, leaving a rawness that hurts. He's a big man, and has long since learned endurance from his friendship with the bear, but even he cannot stand a loss like this, the way it cleaves whole chunks out of you, not thrice.

The Huntsman wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and then descends down the steps to tell Snow the story of his daemon and his wife, because he cannot imagine a more capable pair of hands to carry that kind of love with her into the kingdom of heaven. 

 

 

It's love, of course, that revives her, for love is the only thing more wondrous and timeless than beauty.

 

 

The sensation that pinches him right beneath the breastbone makes him double over with a startled noise, bracing himself on the tattered and oft-corrected map spread out in front of him: it's not quite pain, but peculiar nonetheless. It's stabs at that place inside of him that, for lack of a more apt term, he usually just refers to as his heart, that place he reaches for when Yabriel has drifted out of his line of sight and he wants to call her back.

He recovers, straightening up, and sees his son across from him, rubbing at the same spot with the tips of his fingers, expressionless.

Yabriel ducks her head in under the tent flap, her tawny eyes luminous and her brow furrowed.

"What was that?" she rumbles, and though she keeps her voice low, only for Hammond, it's William who goes strikingly pale all at once, making a noise in his throat and ducking from the tent.

Alarmed now, Hammond follows.

Immediately to the right, a page is in the process of gathering up scattered bits of armor off the ground, plainly having just dropped them. It's unsettling that he hadn't heard the racket that would have made, and she looks a little disturbed as well, pressing her fist against her chest like something is trying to leap into her throat.

A crowd is gathering, a murmur rising among them; people pushing indecently close to each other's daemons, the women standing on tiptoes and the guards pushing back their visors to get a clearer look.

Unconsciously, they clear a path before Hammond and Yabriel, as people usually almost always do. In moments, they can see what has stirred everyone out of their beds.

The princess stands on the chapel steps.

She is dressed in flowing white, her loose hair tossed all around her face by a cross breeze. The flickering torchlight makes her eyes seem enormously, ghoulishly large, and she casts them around the gathered faces, searching for one. She steps down with uncertainty, and a little black-and-white magpie flutters to light upon her shoulder. 

The two of them look out across those gathered before them once more. She looks at the magpie and the magpie looks at her. Hammond watches as, with a flip of his tail, the bird hops down and shifts shape, and somewhere behind him, the page drops her armor again.

A white stag steps up to Snow's side, identical in form to the majestic hart that adorns the shield of every man here.

When they stand beside each other, and are caught in profile, it's as if she wears a crown of antlers, like she could hold the whole of the earth in their cradle.

William breaks free from the crowd first, approaching her slowly, his greyhound pressed close enough that she is in danger of tripping him. He keeps a hand on her head, like a child seeking comfort. The princess sees him coming and smiles, reaching out for him. He steps into range and she spreads her hand flat against his chest. Jubilee jumps at the contact, and William's eyelids flutter as if he is caught in a sunshower. They exchange no words that anyone can hear.

As if drawn by candlelight, her eyes find Hammond next, and she comes to him on bare feet, her face set.

"We will wage war on the queen," are her first words to him in nearly a decade.

"Princess ..." he starts, having no idea where to begin. Not hours ago, they were preparing to bury her, and here she stands in front of him, her chest heaving with life, looking as resplendent as a warrior in a bride's dress. He lifts his eyes to the stag. "Taillow?" he asks, fainter still.

The stag huffs, acknowledging, and bows his head. Yabriel settles onto her haunches, lifting her nose and touching it to Taillow's in gentle greeting, the way daemons do.

"But --" Hammond tries.

"A spell only," Snow says, knowing without asking the turmoil inside his own head. "To give me the likeness of death. Ravenna wants me alive, because she yearns to cut out my heart herself, but she doesn't want me awake and seeding sedition."

"How --"

"I see inside of her," Snow steps closer still, and touches the tips of her fingers to his chest. Immediately, something flares so shockingly hot inside him that he hisses, clapping a hand over hers and pressing down, as if that will relieve the sensation. Yabriel comes to her feet in response, but she doesn't look alarmed. She looks alive in a way Hammond hasn't seen from her since before King Magnus woke with a dagger in his breast. "The same way I see inside you. I know her. She is a child, and she hurts so very terribly; all she loves has been torn from her, but she is bound by her promise to a witch that she will conquer every warmongering kingdom ever to bring destruction down on the heads of the innocent."

"She is a monster, princess," says William, beside them yet again.

"A child," Snow repeats, firmer still. "With a shapechanger daemon. She is terrified of him settling, for a settled daemon reveals too much about a person: I think she fears to look him in the eye and see what he may be, and will do all she can to prevent it. She deserves our pity."

They stare at her.

Her mouth quirks, and she slips her hand from the duke's chest. 

"But first," she promises. "We shall rip my father's kingdom out from underneath her."

"Your kingdom," William corrects her, quiet, and Taillow lows, pawing at the ground with one hoof. Snow's smile grows brighter still.

Then she spins around, hair flying, and raises her voice high to call above the heads of all those assembled.

"Who will ride me with me?" she demands. "Do you not feel me, as I feel you? Did your heart not leap when I woke? There is an ember inside you, a hope that you have long since banked out of sight for fear that someone will dash it. I see it --" she draws close to one man, touching her fingertips to his chest as she did to Hammond and William, and it's impossible to miss how he curls around the contact, the color that comes to his cheeks, the way he stares at her like a man looking into the face of divinity. "And I ignite it."

She moves down the line: she doesn't have to reach for people now, because they are reaching for her, clasping her hands between their own, clutching her shoulder. 

Daemons, big and small, come near to Taillow, and he bows his head to each of them. Bird daemons perch among his antlers, and insects buzz at his ears.

Snow's voice rises further still, torn from her throat as she cries, " _I will become your weapon!"_ She spins around again, mounting the chapel steps so as to better see them all. "I, who will be your queen, shall be the very soul you wield, as close to your side as your own daemon. We will ride against Ravenna's fortress, and we will conquer her, for we carry the only qualities she does not: we have _heart_ and _soul_ and _life_ and she _cannot take that from us!_ So I ask you again: who will ride with me?!"

The answering cry seems to rend the very air with its force; every man, every woman of fighting age cheers aloud, and the daemons add their voices, too. Far in the back, the armored bear pounds the flagstones with his paws, hard enough to make them shiver, and he roars, " _Aye!"_

In unison, Snow and Taillow lift their chins, regality in every inch of them.

And everyone present bends their knee.

 

 

The Huntsman had not been wrong about Hammond's army; many of them have to be fetched from the fields and the neighboring serfdoms, and it's a process that takes two days before it is done. They are milkmaids who slip knives into their boots and wrap rags around their mouths, and they are farmhands with unsettled daemons and limbs growing faster than they are, but they come. Every single one of them, they come.

The delay makes her restless; even as they use the time to swell their ranks and prepare, so, too, does Ravenna.

But she can't deny that some part of her is grateful for the reprieve from the running through forests and the being hunted, even if it is not much of a reprieve for everyone else. But Snow cannot describe how _uplifting_ it is to be surrounded by people after ten years in prison, to be included in the tactical discussions, to have the dwarves pull her aside to offer their assistance in taking the queen's portcullis, to stand in a center of generals who fought with her father and have Taillow stand at her back.

They ride out on sundown on the third day, and before they go, a handmaiden helps her into her leathers and braids her hair in the style the salt-faced women taught her. 

The leathers are light, malleable, and far better protection than Snow's dress and leggings had been. Still, it would have been nice if they'd had a set of armor small enough to fit her, since she will ride at the head.

The handmaiden's too heavy with her first child to ride with them, so she lent her sword to one of the stablehands and now she murmurs her prayers and presses them into Snow's hands. Snow can't see her daemon, but there's a pocket stitched into the front of her skirts that twitches once or twice with excitement.

When she finishes with Snow's hair, Taillow comes over and kneels in her place. He puts his head in Snow's lap, his antlers forming a cage around her. She strokes the soft end of his nose and wonders, not for the first time, how there will ever be enough hours in the day to spend with her daemon, her soul. Never has she seen a brighter light than she did when she woke.

"Princess?" comes a voice from outside the door.

The handmaiden goes to answer it, grimacing when she tries to move too quickly, so Snow lays a hand on her arm and steers her to the chair and goes to the door herself. She opens it to find a bulk of white fur, which she blinks at until it reconciles into the shape of a head and shoulder, the ragged end of an ear.

"Bear," she breathes out, and steps into the hall. "We thought maybe you -- we haven't seen you, it's -- the duke is looking for you, did you know? He wants to talk to you --"

"I know my place in your army, princess, and am honored to lend my strength," the bear returns in a low rumble, tilting his giant head at her and smiling a bear-smile. "I will ride with you as far as you need me, never fear. I have a present for you."

"You --"

The bear shifts his weight onto his haunches, dragging something forward that rattles, careful not to let it bang against the flagstones. In the bear's enormous paws, it looks small and strangely delicate, and the light flickers across its surface. Snow's breath catches in her throat.

It's armor.

"I've been in the forges," the bear explains. "That's why none of the duke's men could find me. A bear's armor, my lady, is the most important part of him. It's his life. You have many strange and varied tools of warcraft in these lands, but on this front, human and bear are in perfect accord."

Snow reaches out, laying her palms flat against the breastplate, sliding them down to touch the fine links of mail. It seems almost to warm to her touch, like it knows her.

"You made me armor," she whispers, feeling barely capable of grasping the magnitude of the gesture.

"You've none of your own," the bear responds. "I put my soul into it, princess. I hope it serves you well."

She admires the craftsmanship for a heartbeat longer, unable to tear her eyes away, but when she does, it's to look up at the bear through a watery gaze, her heart feeling swollen and overfull. She gestures, and when he ducks his head down obligingly, she wraps her arms around it, embracing him as tightly as she dare and burying her face into the knot of bone at the base of his skull.

"Thank you," she murmurs, and, pleased, he rumbles loud enough that she feels it, vibrating against her ribs.

He nudges gently at her chest with his nose. "Stick close to us," he says, soft as a confession. "Can you do that for us, please, princess? He won't ask, but I will. Just ... stick close to us."

He pulls away far enough for her to stroke his cheeks. She sets her mouth and nods at him.

That night, the Duke's army rides with their princess at the head on the back of a white stag, wielding the sword of a dwarf and wearing the armor of a bear, the souls of four hundred warriors blazing safe beneath her breast.

By sundown the next day, she is back in her father's castle, and she is queen.

 

 

They bottleneck through the portcullis, breaching through the castle walls as the sea howls all around them and the tide rushes in to greet them. Ravenna waits for them on the battlements, head held high and her eyes wreathed in a color like smoke. 

Her daemon stands close enough beside her that he is near indistinguishable from her shadow; he wears the form of a stag, as black as Taillow is white.

"Well now," says the Huntsman after a beat. "That's a little ostentatious, aye?"

 

 

The monsters break into jagged shards of black crystal, raining to the stones, where they scatter and lie still. The golden dust from the daemons of the dead settle over them; black and gold, the colors of Ravenna's standard.

Jubilee limps across the floor, flopping on her belly beside him and licking every part of his face she can reach around his helmet. Without a care in the world for how it might look, he pulls her head close, kissing the top of it and pressing his face against hers. He is alive, and so is she.

"Will," she murmurs, coming to attention, her ears pricking forward. "Will, listen."

He does. "I don't hear anything," and a second later, a chill goes through him as the truth of that statement sinks in. There are no sounds coming from above; no great thunderous clash as the two stags collide, no ringing steely song of sword-on-sword. Faint snatches are still audible from the courtyard, where most of the people are dying, but above ... it's silent.

Every muscle screams in protest when he grabs for his sword and hauls himself to his feet. 

The Huntsman is already half-way up the steps, bleeding freely from a wound William can't see. Jubilee, though she's favoring her right side something fierce, keeps nimbly on his heels, like the proximity doesn't make her uncomfortable, and later -- _if_ there is a later -- she and Will are going to have a very long talk about the kind of people she thinks are acceptable friends.

His armor feels colossally heavy, like it's trying to drag him back down, and he wishes this were the kind of takeover that would have benefited from his archery skills, but he grits his teeth and moves.

He reaches the top of the steps, throwing himself head-first into the sanctum and almost skidding into the Huntsman's back.

"Mirror," the man mutters, distractedly, and another voice echoes faintly, "Mirror," like they aren't entirely aware they're doing it.

"What --" William starts, and then he sees.

Two queens lay still underneath a great golden mirror, one shrouded in black and the other gilt in silver.

Ravenna is a limp figure splayed across Snow's knees, cradled like a ragdoll in her arms. Gus's sword lay on the stones beside them, hilt turned towards them like it's still ready to leap to her hand.

The white stag stands close at hand, antlered head lowered, and though a fire blazes high in the pit in the center of the room, his panting breaths curl frostily in the air in front of his nostrils. 

He doesn't look up at their entrance, but Snow does; she weeps freely, hard enough that her shoulders tremble with the force of it, and William knows she felt every death that transpired, is transpiring still; those who fought for her and those who did not. Even Ravenna's death hurt her deeply, is worthy of her tears. William doesn't understand it, but then again, she is the girl he adored wholeheartedly.

She is the queen he followed here today, the way a daemon does to its other half.

"... that it?" asks the Huntsman.

"That's it," Snow agrees, and looks down at the silent corpse in her lap. "She could have made that a lot harder for me. It was a relief for her, I think. She hated her daemon, did I tell you that? Hated everything he represented, and he was the only one she had left, in the end." She touches Ravenna's wizened, chalky cheek. "You can't have my heart," she murmurs, quieter still. "I keep it safe, bound in ribcages that are not my own."

Unconsciously, William lifts his fingers to his breastbone, encased as it is in armor.

Still with that hand over his heart, he crosses the room and kneels before her. Jubilee sinks into a bow at his side.

"The queen is dead," William says, with a quiet, boundless solemnity, and lifts his eyes to hers. "Long live the queen."

 

 

 

She is not hard to find: a glorious figure dressed in red, standing in the heart of the courtyard and wearing a crown made of cornhusk and kindling, adorned with deft twists of barley and dark berries, a fiery autumnal blaze of color against her hair. It is impossible to look away.

She shields her eyes with one hand, watching teams of workers affix boxes full of potting soil outside each window high up in the prison towers. They will sprout flowers in the spring, wild riots of blues and pinks and greens that will crawl over every windowsill.

He hangs back, watching Taillow canter over to her, bending his head to nudge at her shoulder. 

In response, she rubs at his nose with her fingertips. She looks up at him, and then she smiles, startled; there are ringlets of wildgrasses tossed among his antlers, like perhaps the children had been playing a game.

Maybe she will marry, he thinks. She might even marry William, the duke's son, to secure their kingdom.

As far as potential consorts go, he is moderately acceptable; a familiar, noble face to the people, and a soldier besides, and in all honesty, he's been trained to be her hound since the day he was born. It's a logical choice.

Or she might marry someone else entirely: a foreign dignitary, perhaps, or a man she meets on her visit to the salt-faced women rebuilding out in the fen, a Moor fresh back from the wars. Or maybe she will journey with the bear to the highlands in the north, and find an eligible bachelor among the cliffs and fjords. If anyone could do it, it would be her.

Or she might never marry -- that is her right as well. It is certainly no business of his, and the people will love her as long as she lives: their Snow White, their Savior, their White Hart.

The castle's chapel, not dissimilar to Duke Hammond's in layout, is one of the largest and airiest chambers in the entire castle, so immediately after Snow's coronation, she had it converted into a field hospital for those wounded in the takeover: her own or Ravenna's, it matters not now. The salt-faced women work tirelessly under Zatima's matter-of-fact direction, and the Huntsman, too, keeps busy, for he had been the husband of a healer far longer than he'd been a soldier.

Despite their every effort, three more men passed this morning, and he can see the faint ravages of it in Snow's face, even all the way across the courtyard.

William worries about her, he knows: he never betrays it, but Jubilee gets jitters sometimes that are hard for a greyhound to hide. It will never be easy for a queen who is also a conduit, a scepter and a balm, who connects so keenly with her subjects and knows their plight. But he imagines Snow has had enough with being locked in a tower, and prefers this infinitely.

Without thinking about it, he reaches out to her, soundlessly and without a single word, touching that place beneath his breastbone that he'd always equated with _heart_ \-- the place every man thinks of as their daemon.

Snow's head comes up and around instantly.

When her eyes alight up on him, her shoulders relax under the heavy brocade of her dress and she smiles, which he takes as his permission to cross the courtyard and join her.

Even with the threat of frost in the air, miniscule clovers are visibly trying to come up between the stones at her feet. The Huntsman goes to his knee and bows his head over them, saying, "My queen." He rises, and inclines his head to Taillow, who bows his head in return.

"Huntsman," Snow's voice is warm. "I have something of yours I've been meaning to return."

She pulls from somewhere in her bodice, he can't see, a familiar knife; he'd hewn the hilt himself, whittled it with no finesse until it roughly fit the blade he had. It was the same knife he'd given her in the Dark Forest, after he and the bear had thrown their miserable lot in with her, a wanted prisoner with no combat skills. The last he'd seen it, it was buried in Ravenna's chest, and he hadn't thought anything of it then.

Suddenly he knows what happened. Wonderingly, he says, "You used the trick I taught you to slay the queen."

"And didn't let go until I saw her soul," she confirms, close enough that he can see the back-and-forth tick of her eyes as they dance between his.

"You used my knife to take back your kingdom," the Huntsman continues, turning this thought over, and then he smirks. "You know, if I were a lesser man, I might swoon."

"Please don't. You're large, that would be very frightening."

His smirk smoothes out into a true smile without any conscious direction whatsoever from his mind, and he's helpless to stop it. An answering smile plays at the corners of her mouth, and he doesn't tell her that it's already happened: her death had felled him without sound, and he knows, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness, that he will give anything to prevent that from happening ever again. 

Before he can say anything, noise erupts overhead, interrupting them.

Chirruping madly, a pair of magpies swoop down from the battlements, settling briefly among Taillow's antlers to continue their argument. The stag daemon shifts his weight, but doesn't actively do anything to disturb them. He rolls his eyes up like he's trying to see where they might be.

"Do you think he'll stay like that?" he asks Snow, tilting his chin to indicate her daemon.

She muses, silent. The wind picks at the ends of her hair. "I think so," she says eventually. "It feels right. Good. That's how it's supposed to feel, isn't it?" At his nod, she nods back. "Yes, I think this is it for us."

They stand there together for awhile longer, while Snow basks in the contentment that comes with _knowing,_ and the Huntsman feels the low echo of that ache inside his chest, as warm as the glinting reflection of sunlight off steel. Then, when he tries to take his leave -- bowing his head to them both and touching again that spot inside of him just to see the way her eyes lid in response -- she reaches out, catching the edge of his jerkin and releasing immediately.

"Wait, I --" she swallows, and looks up at him. "I don't know your name. Your Christian name," she elaborates, when he lifts his eyebrows at her. "You can't tell me you were called 'Huntsman' all your life."

He regards her for a long moment, and when it looks as if she's going to glance away, discomfited, he seizes on her moment of distraction and strikes, aiming for a soft spot at the base of her ribs, where he knows she's bruised.

She blocks his thrust automatically, twisting his arm away from her, gripping it and using his momentum to pull him in close, her fist knotted right over his heart. It all happens in the span of a heartbeat.

It seems to startle her more than it does him.

He puts his other hand on her waist before she can step away, leaning in and dropping his voice so that his words travel to her and no further.

"Perhaps you'll give me one," he tells her, and watches the way her eyes widen, up close and incredibly bright. Like this, he can feel her every inhale. "Perhaps you'll look me in the eye and greet my soul by its name. Call it, and I will answer. If there is anyone in the world to trust to call me truly, I would pick you."

She lifts her chin, as if his words had been a challenge, and her hand flattens, each of her fingertips touching him like five separate points of starlight. 

"Maybe I will, in time," she replies, defiant, before she pushes at him so that he takes a step back, even as her fingers catch at his jerkin and he steadies himself with the hand on her waist, so that they pull each other back and forth for a second. Then they let go.

He walks away, and then, because she is a troublesome thing no matter how she crowns herself in victory and regality, she throws at his back, "Huntsman."

He turns.

Snow sets her jaw, her eyes flashing. Taillow stands tall at her shoulder, looking amused. "The next time you kiss me," she says. "Try not to have thieved an entire chapel's worth of wine beforehand, will you?"

The Huntsman throws his head back, his laugh tearing free from his throat and scattering into the sky, carried there as if on the wings of a woodpecker.

 

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> Helpful Google Image reference for animals you might not know:
> 
> [Lar, a red-crested woodpecker](http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/image/image_gallery?uuid=67470a8c-1370-485b-be53-503a7d56f776&groupId=11003)  
> [the priest's rabbit-eared bandicoot](http://www.factzoo.com/sites/all/img/mammals/marsupials/bilby/bilby-gray.jpg) (also known as the bilby)  
> [Finn's black-backed jackal](http://www.caninest.com/images/black-backed-jackal.jpg)  
> [the Huntsman's black leopard](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsxnmljHu71qdu8h5o8_500.jpg) (for a long time, panthers were thought to be an entirely different species of big cat, but they're actually leopards with a genetic pigment mutation. cool, huh?)  
> [Zatima's basilisk lizard](http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/005/cache/green-basilisk-lizard_562_600x450.jpg)  
> [Magnus's golden eagle](http://veryveryfun.com/pics/Frendship-With-Golden-Eagle/Frendship-With-Golden-Eagle-1.jpg) (hee, I just really like this picture :D:D)


End file.
